“This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith”

(1 John 5:4)

Salvation means different things to different people at different times. To the one survivor of that Turkish plane that crashed yesterday morning, salvation meant a miraculous deliverance from death when his sixty-two fellow passengers instantly perished and he walked out of the crumpled and burning fuselage without scratch or scorch, saying, “I don’t know why I’m still alive. It’s a miracle.”

Salvation to Gerald Kosh, that young American who was captured last week by the Chinese on Paracel Island, would certainly mean release from a Red Chinese military prison.

Salvation means different things to different people at different times. So also, saving faith is a many-sided reality with rich rewards for each of us at different levels of faith. Saint Paul in his writings tells what he discovered from his own experience about the glorious, multifaceted, saving thing faith is. Paul distinguishes among faith as conviction of the reality of the unseen world, and faith as trust in the promises of God, and faith as surrender to Jesus Christ. For each level of faith, Paul says, there is a great and rewarding salvation.

First of all, faith is a conviction of the reality of the unseen world. “We walk by faith, not by sight,” wrote the apostle to his fellow Christians at Corinth. Some people guide their course through their earthly existence only by what they can see and hear, by what they can reach out and touch and grasp. For them this is the only real world. Materialism is their philosophy, expediency their chart and compass.

But others insist there is another world, just as real, though unseen, of spiritual and moral values such as mercy, justice, truth, love, and honesty, and that these are the trustworthy channel-markers by which the voyage of life should be charted. “Sight is the physical vision of material things; faith is the insight which apprehends the realities of the spirit — goodness, truth, love,” The Interpreter’s Bible says.

Many years ago the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to this country hoping to find the source of America’s greatness and genius. Upon his return to his native shores he wrote:

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers; and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her fertile fields and boundless forests; and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her rich mines and vast world commerce; and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her democratic Congress and her matchless constitution; and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if ever America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

Yes, this is one thing faith is, the assurance of the reality and worth of the unseen spiritual world and allegiance to it. And this is a saving faith for mankind. But what sort of salvation does it bring?

Faith like this saves a man from an empty materialism, from coming down to the end of life and having to see the material things go and realize too late he has put his trust and his heart in fake and perishable commodities.

Faith like this also saves a man from fear; if he is wedded to the eternal verities and courageously living for them, then he is unafraid of the partial powers of a lost world.

John F. Kennedy in his book Profiles in Courage told the story of how Sen. George Norris of Nebraska led the fight in 1917 to kill the armed ship bill, believing as he did that its passage would plunge our nation into war with Germany. As a result of his efforts, Norris was denounced all over the country as a traitor. Nebraska, his home state, was up in arms against him. He decided to go back to Omaha to defend his action. Friends advised him to give up the idea. Feeling is too high against you, they said. No one will come to hear you tell your story. If ever you should gather a crowd, they will be hostile. Don’t go, they warned. But George Norris went anyway. He rented his own hall. When not one of his friends dared to introduce him, he went alone to stand before the three thousand silent people who had gathered. Nervously he walked out on the platform to face them. There was no applause, no hissing, just grim faces. Quietly, slowly he began, “I have come home to tell you the truth,” and the audience burst into applause.

Life will not always give us the accolade of the public’s approval for our espousal of truth, honesty, and justice, but it will give us the inner assurance of being in harmony with eternal righteousness, and that is more lastingly satisfying than the thundering cheers of a mighty multitude. It is a saving faith.

But faith, Christian saving faith, is more than this. Saint Paul speaks of faith as a trust in the promises of God. This is faith that goes a step further, you see. It embodies not only a conviction that the spiritual world is real, that truth, justice, mercy, purity, honesty are genuine commodities and real and solid as coal and iron, gold and diamonds, real estate and automobiles; it not only holds that these spiritual qualities are of the very nature of God and hence everlasting; but it goes one step further and believes that God is not just an oblong blur, a nebulous mass of moral statutes, but a person with a father’s face of love whose gracious promises can be relied upon with implicit trust. Such faith builds its world, its home, its profession, on these blessed promises of God rather than the hope, promises, and collateral of a lost world.

For Saint Paul, the classic example of the man with this kind of faith was Abraham. God promised Abraham that he would give him a family and make of his direct descendants a nation as numerous as the stars in the heavens or the sands of the sea and through Abraham and his descendants bring a great spiritual blessing to the whole world.

This promise of God Abraham believed, he trusted; in fact, he launched his life upon it, even though the most important facts in Abraham’s situation from the human point of view at the time God gave his promise were Abraham’s own great age and his wife’s sterility. Abraham and Sarah seemed to be the least likely couple in all the world to raise a family. Abraham considered these factors but did not weaken in faith. He did not shrink from facing truth even though it was forbidding and unpalatable, but neither did he allow such unwelcome truth to undermine his

What are the promises of God to us? They are like the hairs of your head, without number. Every page of Scripture is crowded with them. You have but to open and read. But there are some more sweeping and comprehensive than others. Consider these: “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.” These are the promises of God’s constant companionship with you in every experience.

Then there’s this: “My grace is sufficient for thee,” the promise of unlimited supplies of God’s grace in every emergency. Paul, the persecuted and the prisoner, found that when he ventured his life in implicit trust in this promise, he was never disappointed. He wrote: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound.” And this: God “rescued me from so terrible a death, he rescues still, and I rely upon him for the hope that he will continue to rescue me.”

Then there is God’s promise that even death will be swallowed up in victory.

And what is the salvation procured by such faith? This trust in the promises of God is truly a saving faith, for it saves us from the heartbreak of loneliness, from frustration, despondency, and over anxiousness. It bestows poise on our spirits in the midst of storm.

But finally and supremely, saving faith in New Testament religion is surrender to Jesus Christ. “I am crucified with Christ,” wrote Paul to the Galatians. “Nevertheless I live; yet not 1, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.” The ultimate step of faith is surrender to Christ. We are not saved by acceptance of a dogma but by relationship to a person, and that relationship is established by our surrender to Jesus Christ.

We have, though, a distaste for that word surrender, and naturally so. It speaks of defeat or unconditional capitulation. And that is just what surrender to Jesus Christ is. Yet paradoxically, it is only through making this surrender that we have hope of achieving victory; through it lies our only chance of realizing our unique selfhood.

James Stewart of Scotland had a great sermon on the text “What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Of course, this text is meant primarily for the marriage ceremony, and that is where we always hear it used. But Stewart observed that there are some inseparable affinities, which God has joined together and which man puts asunder at his own peril and ruin. One of these eternal unions made in heaven by God himself is the human soul and its Savior, Jesus Christ. They were made for each other. Your soul and your Savior have been destined for each other, and you will never become what God purposed you to be until in love and surrender you are united through faith to him.

Have you ever built a boat or a little ship of your own? I shall always remember the summertime labors of some boyhood friends who had connived with me to make a boat. We got our plans, cut our lumber, assembled the parts, and caulked and painted our ship with care in the workshop far from the water. At last the boat was finished and trucked across the miles to the river. Then came the exciting moment for her launching. How often through all the days of our labors the thought had come to plague us, “Will she really float? Will she prove seaworthy and maneuverable?” I can see it as if it were day before yesterday — our little ship going down the improvised skids from the truck, hitting the water with a splash, and skipping along the surface with joyous, graceful bounds as if to say, “Why, this is what I was made for. I’m in my own element at last.”

You were made for your Savior, Jesus Christ, and you will never know your real element until you become through surrender to him a new creature in Christ. You will never know the perfect freedom of the redeemed of God until by surrender of your will to him you become the bond servant of Jesus Christ.

And what sort of salvation is this? Why, such a faith saves man from the curse of sin, from spiritual death, from disunity and split personality, unto the life that is eternal.

Faith as surrender to Jesus Christ saves one from the tragedy of never becoming, never realizing what in the economy of the ages and the providence of God one was intended to become. What a catastrophe to come into this world, to have lavished upon oneself all the love of parents, the training of teachers, to have lived and loved, to have striven and fought, lived and died, and yet to have missed selfhood’s supreme expression, failing the very purpose of the whole adventure.

And if this is what saving faith is like for the individual who surrenders to Jesus Christ, just see what marvelous salvation it effects in the whole social order!

Several years ago a friend sent me a clipping from Newsweek about the rescue work of the Mennonites among the families of Flint, Michigan, whose homes had been destroyed by tornadoes. The Mennonites arrived from several states, some as far away as Pennsylvania, without fanfare or publicity, and began to rebuild the homes of those most in need of help, the uninsured, and the badly injured. They took no money, no assistance, no thanks. Usually they just put the outer walls and roofs back, leaving the refinishing on the inside for the storm sufferers to do themselves. But when an owner was hospitalized or was a widow, the Mennonites rebuilt the entire home.

A union carpenter was asked whether his union objected to the Men­nonite farmers doing carpenter’s work. He scoffed and said, “They belong to a bigger union than we do. When there is trouble like this, I wish more of us felt like they do.”

And why do the Mennonites feel and act as they do and turn loose such a stream of redeeming love in the world? There is just one plain, simple answer: They have a Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, whom by faith they serve in complete surrender, so that his love, compassion, and mercy find expression in the labors of their hands.

This is saving faith, what it is and what it can do for us and our world. Have you claimed its victory over the world as your victory? Are you trying to walk by sight or by faith? Are you trusting in the promises of God or still trying to rely wholly upon yourself? Have you surrendered to Jesus Christ?